habit

People who conduct a successful local search on their smartphone are much more likely to make an in-store visit than PC and tablet users, according to a recent Neustar Localeze survey.

Perhaps surprisingly, especially since there are so many click-to-call search ads floating around the mobile Web, smartphone users are actually more likely to contact a business online after completing a local search, while tablet and PC users prefer to contact a business over the telephone.

The 3,000-person survey also found that overall conversion rates are higher among mobile users, whether they contacted a local business online, over the phone, or in-person

An impressive 78% of them ended up making a purchase. Similarly, 77% of tablet users converted into buyers, whereas only 59% of PC users did.

When it comes to performing additional research on a product or service after an initial local business search, tablets lead. This supports previous studies which found that people prefer to conduct more complex activities— such as browsing social networks, reading, and writing — on their tablet than on their smartphone. Also, probably due to this habit of conducting additional research before buying, tablet users tend to spend slightly more on a purchase.

If you’ve made it a habit of viewing YouTube videos on your mobile device in an effort to flout the site’s pre-roll ads, your days of bliss are quickly drawing to a close. Today, the site implemented TrueView in-stream ads for the mobile platform, and like you’ve become accustomed to on the desktop, you’ll begin to notice these commercials on your smartphone and tablet. Now, we get the need for content producers to make some coin, but the move certainly represents the end of an era. Fortunately, just like on the desktop, you’ll have the ability to skip these ads after five seconds. Maybe now, you can take pride in making an independent producer rich beyond imagination — or, at least helping them buy some lunch.

That’s because credit cards are easier for shoppers to use. Unlike a coupon, they work automatically and you can always store the cards in your wallet.

Credit cards would also simplify the redemption process in that consumers could easily swipe and credit 2, 3, or even 5% cash back to their account, for example. Plus the cards present a lucrative stream of revenue that only stands to be threatened by sophisticated card companies like American Express and Visa.

But would daily deal credit cards be a boon to cash-strapped consumers or just passed off as a trend among the sites’ spendthrift regulars?

“Most likely it’s going to be something high end consumers who are spenders will want,” says Papadimitriou. “They won’t be making them their primary cards across the board, but people don’t usually make store-brand cards their primary cards anyway.”

This makes sense: Lightspeed found that relative to the overall U.S. credit cardholder population, Groupon and LivingSocial regulars tend to have better credit scores, are twice as likely to pay off their monthly card balances in full, and are three times as likely to make purchases with them. What’s more, about half are earning $75,000, so they can afford it.

So while the cards wouldn’t do much to spark the economy on the whole—or soothe the millions of Americans desperate for a deal—they might do plenty to stoke spending among the credit elite. Which is exactly what Groupon or LivingSocial want, since most affinity cards are hard up to take on risky credit holders.

If you’re in the high end, however, think twice before signing up if a card is released, says Papadimitriou.

“As with all co-branded cards, if you’re already a loyal customer and are spending a lot of money—say more than $2,000 to $3,000 a year, then get that branded card because it will likely be useful. But if you’re not a loyal customer or a frequent spender with that company, then don’t worry about it.”

Despite the creation of the .xxx top-level domain (TLD), no one will use it. Porn purveyors will not use it for sure because they want to avoid parental control software which can easily block the entire TLD. And regular citizens won’t know to type it in or will simply add a .com after it because of force of habit. This is a perfect example of a lot of work that went into creating something that no one will use.

A new top-level porn domain, XXX (e.g., http://pornexample.xxx), was approved today by ICANN, the non-profit organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and approval of new top-level domains like .com, .org, and so on. This doesn’t mean that all porn sites will leave their current cushy URLs for XXX, but it’ll be an easy block for concerned parents. [PC World]

No folks, those mythical N8 review units still aren’t on our doorsteps, but we can offer you the next best thing: a thorough (we mean thorough) overview of the Symbian^3 environment that will be front and center on Nokia’s next great phone. Eldar Murtazin of mobile-review reports on everything from the sophisticated handling of contacts and caller ID pictures, through the noticeable speed improvements, past the limited utility of online widgets that display only two lines at a time, beyond the “weak spot” web browser, and all the way to Symbian’s unhealthy habit of “clinging to continuity.” It’s an enlightening read, which pulls no punches with its conclusion: Symbian^3 is an evolutionary step up from S60 5th edition, which brings nothing new to the market and offers no comparative advantages. Strong words from Eldar, paricularly when he doesn’t disclose what build of the OS he’s using; his rationale, however, is that his analysis relates to overarching design decisions and ignores software bugs and version-specific foibles. Make of that what you will.

By defining “digital” as not the technology, device, or channel, but rather the habits and expectations of modern users, we are able to make practical decisions about which marketing tactics, technologies, devices, and channels to use to match these users’ habits and expectations. If you know their habit is to search, then you wouldn’t blow your whole budget on TV ads and have nothing for them to find online when they search. if you believe they expect to be able to find information from their iPhones, then you wouldn’t make your whole site high bandwidth, flashy, and Flash because they wont be able to view it at all.

Every year around SXSW, there’s a surge in interest about twitter. This time around people have even gone as far as to proclaim twitter to be “the next google” or “the future of search” etc. Bullocks!

Here’s why:

1) distant from other social networks – While we are seeing a massive surge in interest and usage of twitter, it is still a long way off from the number of users of other social networks; it will take a long time to get to critical mass; and this is a prerequisite for twitter to assail the established habit of the majority of consumers to “google it.” — Google’s already a verb.

2) no business model – It remains to be seen whether Twitter can come up with a business model to survive for the long haul. Ads with search are proven. Ads on social networks are not. And given the 140-character limit, there’s hardly any space to add ads.

3) lead adopters’ perspective is skewed – Twitter is still mostly lead adopters and techies so far; so the perspectives on its potential may be skewed too positively. As more mainstream users start to use it, we’re likely to see more tweets about nose picking, waking up, making coffee, being bored, etc…. This will quickly make the collective mass of content far less specialized and useful (as it is now).

4) too few friends to matter – Most people have too few friends. Not everyone is a Scott Monty ( @scottmonty ) with nearly 15,000 followers. So while a user’s own circle of friends would be useful for real-time searches like “what restaurant should I go to right now?” the circle is too small to know everything about everything they want to search on. And even if you take it out to a few concentric circles from the original user who asked, that depends on people retweeting your question to their followers and ultimately someone notifying you when the network has arrived at an answer — not likely to happen.

5) topics only interesting to small circle of followers – Most topics tweeted are interesting to only a very small circle of followers, most likely not even to all the followers of a particular person. A great way to see this phenomenon is with twitt(url)y. It measures twitter intensity of a particular story and lists the most tweeted and retweeted stories. Out of the millions of users and billions of tweets, the top most tweeted stories range in the 100 – 500 tweet range and recently these included March 18 – Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 preview event; #skittles; and the shutdown of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. Most other tweets are simply not important enough to enough people for them to retweet.

6) single purpose apps or social networks go away when other sites come along with more functionality or when big players simply add their functionality to their suite of services.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.